Roger Kimball is a conservative cultural critic, editor and publisher of The New Criterion, and president of Encounter Books. He is the author of numerous books on culture, education, and politics, including *Tenured Radicals* and *The Long March*. He contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard from 1996 to 2017, covering literature, culture, and intellectual history.
In an 1852 letter, Gustave Flaubert announced his ambition to write “a book about nothing, a book with no external attachments." He added: "The most beautiful books are those with the least matter."
In an 1852 letter, Gustave Flaubert announced his ambition to write “a book about nothing, a book with no external attachments." He added: "The most beautiful books are those with the least matter."
A couple of years ago, I was asked to give a talk about “The American Novel Today.” It wasn’t my first choice of topic, frankly, partly because I read as few contemporary novels as possible, partly (here we get into cause and effect) because most of the novels that get noticed today (like most of…
The New Road to Serfdom
The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski was just a few months shy of his 82nd birthday when he died at his home in Oxford on July 17, after what his daughter Agnieszka described as "a brief and very sudden illness." For anyone inclined to despair that we live in intellectually diminished times,…
At a June 4 meeting in Washington to observe the tenth anniversary of Encounter Books, sponsored by the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books, offered some introductory remarks, "Encounter…
The Dangerous Book for Boys
I have never been a particular fan of Lucian Freud's painting. On the contrary, I have always thought there was something distinctly repulsive about it.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) is generally regarded as one of the great realist portrait painters of all time, and his greatness is confirmed by Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch, a collection of more than 150 works showing at the National Gallery in Washington through August 22…
Florence Rubenfeld
John M. Ellis
Is there anything left to say about Evelyn Waugh? Since his death in 1966 at the age of 62, a veritable industry has grown up around the great satirist. A somewhat cloying but immensely popular television miniseries of his novel Brideshead Revisited got the ball rolling in the early 1980s.…